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ORIGINAL PAINTINGS Ron Clark was born in a small, agrarian community just north of the Oklahoma-Texas border in the fertile Red River Valley. One summer morning during his childhood, he wandered into an artist’s studio near his grandmother’s house and discovered an artist on a ladder working a mural-sized canvas. The artist – still one of Clark’s closest friends and confidantes – was Harold Stevenson, a Surrealist painter who rose to prominence in Paris during the mid 1950s and whose debut in the New York avant garde was alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichenstein and Claes Oldenburg as part of Sidney Janis’s legendary 1962 group exhibition, The New Realists. This chance encounter not only proved pivotal to Clark’s multi-disciplinary future as an artist, but also established the foundations of a lifelong friendship with a master painter and an important figure in the history of American art. Gifted with drawing skills as a child, at university Clark first studied architecture, then graphic design and art. After working for several years in Houston as an Architectural Illustrator and in Dallas as a Graphic Designer, he moved to New York and spent two years in the BFA program at Parsons School of Design. While in New York, Clark worked as a Graphic Designer, a gallery assistant, and did pastel portraits from live sittings, working in a refined, almost photo-realistic style. After returning to Dallas and working several years as a Designer and Art Director, in 1995 Clark began creating Pitturas Metaphysica, a series of large oil paintings combining minimalist geometric imagery with expanses of radiant color and rendered in a complex technique of multiple layering and metallic oil underpainting. This body of work began exhibiting in 1997 with a one-man show. Clark’s 2000 series, Body of the Diagram, drew from his attraction to early Modernist painting, neoteric architectural design and forms from the human body. The work is characterized by dramatic imagery, ambiguous relationships between form and space, sensuous shapes, and a rich, vibrant palette. Works from this series were critically lauded and included in the 2001 Dallas Critics’ Choice Exhibition at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art. Impending Presence, Clark’s current series, is a cycle of paintings evoking primal chaos, then mortalism, and resolving with compositions of ethereal, Zen-like presence. These paintings are characterized by mono- and poly-chromatic hues of saturated color emanating from highly textured layers of media and myriad coats of metallic and oil color. Impending Presence marks Clark’s evolution from an artist with established collectibilty into the broader domains of art criticism and an expansive exhibition presence in galleries and museums across the U.S.
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